It has been more than two years since coronavirus started to spread around the world. Due to the virus, the economic downturn has been continuing around the world, causing a contraction in art production and consumption, and the exhibition industry is also in crisis due to quarantine policies: social distancing.
According to 2020 market research from the European Exhibition Industry Alliance(EEIA), which specializes in the European exhibition industry, 3,300 exhibitions have been canceled or postponed. This caused an economic loss of 124.9 billion euros and 1.2 million jobs are at risk of firing. It was quite predictable that the number of visitors had significantly decreased and the distance between the work and the public had been amplified. In response to this situation, some galleries tried to overcome the crisis and attemped various alternatives to narrow the distance. Let’s take a look at how galleries around the world tried to recover.
In March 2020, the exhibition EXPANDED HOLIDAY by artist KAWS was held at Dongdaemun Design Plaza(DDP) in Seoul. The exhibition was simultaneously held in several places including London, New York, Hong Kong, Paris, etc. Then how could they have a single piece of work at the same time?
This innovative exhibition could be held through Artificial Reality(AR) technology, which synthesizes object information over the reality as a background to make it appear as if it actually exists. Artist KAWS said, “AR allows me to expand on that(which means his career - creating objects and exhibiting works in public spaces) in a whole new arena. The possibilities of locations and scale are endless.” AR exhibition viewing was conducted through mobile devices such as smartphones. As the word, ‘mobile’ itself means, the feature of being able to move easily has greatly improved accessibility and portability. Visitors were able to watch AR exhibitions by moving around comfortably or sitting.
This picture above presents an AR exhibition <COMPANION> in DDP. You can see that work is three times bigger than the size of human beings.
Such a viewing experience can give convenience for visitors and offer a unique adventure of an AR exhibition. And of course, most importantly, while reducing the density of people, it was designed innovatively so that many people from various countries could appreciate the exhibition.
Let’s take a look at some other exhibitions held overseas. Art Basel, which is held annually, is one of the most prestigious art fairs held in Basel(in Switzerland), Miami, and Hong Kong. In the hometown(Basel), 300 galleries from around the world gather to introduce paintings, sculptures, installations, videos, and performances by over 2,500 artists in total. Unfortunately, this massive event was canceled once in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
In 2021, there was a postponement due to the continuing pandemic. Fortunately, though the scale was greatly reduced to 30% of the original level, it was possible to hold the fair. In Art Basel Hong Kong 2021, the offline and online exhibitions were effectively displayed together, receiving favorable reviews in both quarantine and the exhibition quality. The exhibitor displayed the works online using two methods: Online Viewing Room(OVR) and live streaming. OVR is a web page that allows you to view the works on an online display. It was first introduced in 2020, and now in 2022, several galleries around the world are operating it independently.
Art Basel’s OVR displays all of the exhibited works and can be accessed through the Art Basel web page or application. Regretfully, it cannot be compared with the experience of actually seeing the works in the gallery, but the online exhibition does offer detailed curations and high-resolution quality photos you can enjoy without limitations of time and space. You can enjoy the collections sorted by Art Basel, such as emerging artists or unconventional painters, or search for works one by one and read the curation.
Real-time Art Basel Hong Kong Live had shown the exhibition hall through the online
platform streaming and conducted a curatorial tour for VIPs, which increased the sense of presence and decreased the cons of being non-face-to-face. It would have been an opportunity for people from all over the world to watch the streaming and share their opinions about the work by writing comments.
In 2022, exhibitions with the NFT are catching people’s attention. NFT has recently become a hot topic being in gear with three elements: the digital world represented the ‘Metaverse,’ people who want to enjoy art, and the era of enjoying investment. NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token, and now most of the existing products and works are given their own digital value(the NFT). The purchaser can get psychological satisfaction and the value of scarcity that only he or she has. NFT art dealing has been on the rise - Twitter, Kakao, also Instagram includes the dealing system.
This market has expanded a lot and now it is entering the actual exhibition hall. A gallery in Korea, SpaceSo, has been mainly exhibiting NFT works since last winter. You can see photos and descriptions of all the works on display on the web page, and the exhibition is also being held at a gallery located in Mapo-gu, Seoul. Anyone interested in this new exhibition can visit this page to view some works. If you want to go to the exhibition hall in person, make a reservation and enjoy them at no cost. This gallery has held an exhibition called “( ) on PAPER” from April 7th to May 8th, 2022. It would have been an exellent experience to visit and see them offline.
It seems that some galleries have found suitable alternatives, such as AR exhibitions and parallel OVR and offline exhibitions, despite the crisis that the exhibition industry has faced due to the coronavirus. Although it was a hard time in both 2020 and 2021, it was able to find a new type of exhibition that captured both the quality of the exhibition and the satisfaction of the visitors. In 2022, since the words Corona and coexistence seem familliar together, let’s look forward to the other new creative forms of the exhibition are coming into our daily life!